Shoreline Public Art highlights artist Lisa Myers Bulmash for Black History Month

Relatively Progressive (2019) collage by Lisa Myers Bulmash
featuring Shoreline resident Edwin Pratt

For Black History Month, Shoreline Public Art is highlighting “Relatively Progressive” (2019) by Lisa Myers Bulmash, part of the City’s Civic Art Collection.

Lisa Myers Bulmash is a Seattle-based collage artist whose work often incorporates archival imagery, family photographs, and historical documents to explore identity, memory, and place. Through layered composition and narrative detail, she invites viewers to reconsider how personal and collective histories shape belonging.

“Relatively Progressive” draws from the Edwin Pratt Archives at the Black Heritage Society of Washington State and was created as part of the exhibition “Living the Dream, Dreaming the Life.”

The work centers Edwin C. Pratt, former director of the Seattle Urban League and a Shoreline resident.

Behind Pratt’s figure, Bulmash incorporates a typed page from one of his essays on desegregation, referencing “silent treatment” and “fence building” as tactics used against Black families moving into white neighborhoods. 

A newspaper clipping from Pratt’s final speech, “A New Thrust,” and graphic lines connecting Pratt to the home behind him underscore the tension between the promise of the American Dream and the realities of housing discrimination in what is now Shoreline.

The title “Relatively Progressive” reflects Pratt’s leadership within the civic structures of his time, while archival notes reveal his frustration with the limits of incremental change within a society shaped by white supremacy.

Through this layered work, Bulmash invites reflection on progress, belonging, and the ongoing work of equity in our community.

We are honored to steward this artwork and to recognize artists who deepen our understanding of local civil rights history.